Monday, February 22, 2010

Former PM Allawi’s Iraqi National Movement Breaking Apart

Former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s Iraqi National Movement list that is running in the March 2010 parliamentary election is quickly breaking apart. One of the major Sunni members of his bloc, the Iraqi National Dialogue Front of Parliamentarian Saleh al-Mutlaq recently announced that they would boycott the election because of Mutlaq’s banning by the Accountability and Justice Commission for alleged Baathist ties. Mutlaq claimed that his barring was the work of Iran that controlled the Commission, and that they were tainting the vote. The party is also protesting the arrest of one its members in Diyala at the beginning of February by government forces. The boycott is not a complete one however, as members of Mutlaq’s party will reportedly still participate in the balloting in Tamim province, stating that the situation in Kirkuk requires them to.

The Dialogue Front is said to be upset with the National Movement as well. It feels that it didn’t support Mutlaq enough during his problems with the Accountability and Justice Commission. The National Dialogue Front’s announcement also came right after the National Movement said that it would participate in the elections despite the problems with their candidates and the anti-Baathist campaign.

Just a few days before, one of the smaller coalition members in the National Movement, the Authentic Arab Gathering, said that it was leaving Allawi’s list too. It quoted differences in views, and that it would be joining parliamentarian Mithal al-Alusi’s National Party instead.

Allawi’s list was considered the main nationalist rival to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law heading into the March elections. After the Prime Minister’s coalition won pluralities across the south and Baghdad during the January 2009 provincial balloting, it backed away from its nationalist and security based campaign due to the bombings against Iraq’s ministries in Baghdad that hurt Maliki’s standing. Instead, he turned to his Shiite base by joining the anti-Baathist campaign started by the Accountability and Justice Commission, which opened the door to Allawi’s National Movement to assume the mantle of the leading secular list in the March vote. Now he has lost one of his main allies, Mutlaq, and one of his smaller coalition members, the Arab Gathering. That probably means the nationalist vote will be even more diluted and divided. At the same time, no other party seems willing to join Mutlaq’s boycott. If he doesn’t change his mind he will lose the 11 seats the National Dialogue Front currently holds in parliament, and can only hope that his party does well in Tamim to maintain any official role in Iraqi politics. Mutlaq could come out the biggest loser in the end, more than Allawi.

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Musings On Iraq was started in 2008 to explain the political, economic, security and cultural situation in Iraq via original articles and interviews. I have written for the Jamestown Foundation, Tom Ricks’ Best Defense at Foreign Policy and the Daily Beast, and was responsible for a chapter in the book Volatile Landscape: Iraq And Its Insurgent Movements. My work has been published in Iraq via NRT, AK News, Al-Mada, Sotaliraq, All Iraq News, and Ur News all in Iraq. I was interviewed on BBC Radio 5, Radio Sputnik, CCTV and TRT World News TV, and have appeared in CNN, the Christian Science Monitor, The National, Columbia Journalism Review, Mother Jones, PBS’ Frontline, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Institute for the Study of War, Radio Free Iraq, Rudaw, and others. I have also been cited in Iraq From war To A New Authoritarianism by Toby Dodge, Imagining the Nation Nationalism, Sectarianism and Socio-Political Conflict in Iraq by Harith al-Qarawee, ISIS Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassahn, The Rise of the Islamic State by Patrick Cocburn, and others. If you wish to contact me personally my email is: motown67@aol.com